2.2 Use Cases for the GNU Build System

In this section we explore several use cases for the GNU Build System.
You can replay all of these examples on the ‘amhello-1.0.tar.gz’
package distributed with Automake. If Automake is installed on your
system, you should find a copy of this file in
‘prefix/share/doc/automake/amhello-1.0.tar.gz’, where
prefix is the installation prefix specified during configuration
(prefix defaults to ‘/usr/local’, however if Automake was
installed by some GNU/Linux distribution it most likely has been set
to ‘/usr’). If you do not have a copy of Automake installed,
you can find a copy of this file inside the ‘doc/’ directory of
the Automake package.

Some of the following use cases present features that are in fact
extensions to the GNU Build System. Read: they are not specified by
the GNU Coding Standards, but they are nonetheless part of the build
system created by the Autotools. To keep things simple, we do not
point out the difference. Our objective is to show you many of the
features that the build system created by the Autotools will offer to
you.